How wrong can a Nobel Peace Prize winner be?

This wrong: Peaceful revolution ‘only solution’.

You could believe that only by ignoring all of history and current events including those in her own country.

More realistically, one could say that peaceful revolution is preferable. But far less likely.

History proves that successful revolutions are violent: even those that are touted as “peaceful.” Violent and lasting revolutions have produced the current democratic governments of the United States, France, Mexico and others.

So-called peaceful revolutions have all involved violence and prevailed only because of the eventual moral use of violence and continued threats of violence against the counter-revolutionaries. India, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya (one hopes) and the American Civil Rights Movement all started with violence against non-violent protesters. They succeeded because the violence against the non-violent created outrage among those with a conscience who also had the the will and the power to change things.
The fall of the Soviet Union may be the best example of a peaceful revolution. Obviously preferable, but more a factor of economic decay that allowed the decline of power.

On the other hand, China’s Tiananmen Square, and the slaughter of innocents in Syria, and Iran are among many excellent — and more recent — examples of the abject failure of peaceful protest without power. If you have the guns and the will, you can always slaughter your way into the status quo.

On the other hand, if you have the guns and the will, you can make sure that democracy and human rights prevail.

NON-VIOLENCE, VIOLENCE AND HOW THREATENED VIOLENCE CREATES PEACE

UCLA Professor Bradford Stone, the hero of my book Perfect Killer, made this point when discussing the role of non-violent protest in the United States civil rights movement. Here, he is discussing the prosecution of a cold-case hate crime with Jasmine Thompson, a Black civil rights attorney. The conversation also addresses the issue of why former dictators, despots and war criminals should be brought to justice.

“But why prosecute Talmadge now? The man’s old and coming apart at the seams. His awful seizures tear him apart and he’s got terminal larynx cancer from cigarettes. Why doesn’t somebody just let him die. The cancer’s its own punishment.”

“Punishment is not always justice,” Jasmine said. “Do you think the Nuremberg trials were only about punishment and the culpability of those being tried?”

She paused for an answer I did not have, then shook her head.

“Justice outranks punishment. It brings a cultural repudiation of criminal behavior and that act brings justice—to the individual directly wronged and to society as a whole.”

“But why Talmadge and why now?”

“What’s happening now began in 1990, a couple of weeks before Christmas when a grand jury in Jackson indicted Byron De La Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers.”

I was familiar with the case. Evers had been gunned down in front of his home in 1963. An ambitious young district attorney in Hinds County, Bill Waller, brought De La
Beckwith to trial and endured abuse and anonymous death threats to see justice done.

Waller also resisted intense pressure from the racists who controlled the state—the Stennis/Eastland Democrats who had made their careers standing in the schoolhouse door and who thought good race relations was providing new paint to freshen up the Colored Only signs smeared across the Mississippi landscape like ugly cultural graffiti. In this atmosphere, Waller got hung juries in two separate trials. I suppose that, given the all-white juries back then, the verdicts stood as a partial victory, and indicated that not all white people were behind Mississippi’s brutal apartheid.

Less than ten years later, Mississippi elected “nigger lover” Waller as governor thanks in large part to the FBI backed up by the guns and steel of the federal government and National Guard troops.

Many think the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent protests did the whole job. Partly true enough, Dr. King and his protesters had to be the first wave to show the nation their dedication, their suffering, and to help Americans understand the evil. Build a nationwide outrage intense enough to commit federal guns and bullets to protect the innocent.

Reality is that this is a nasty Darwinian world and you can’t love your enemies to death. The world ain’t about Kumbaya. And if that’s all you have, you and all your good intentions are gonna be eaten alive. The Civil Rights Movement would never have succeeded without the threat of federal violence even the Klan had to respect.

“Bobby DeLaughter got a conviction in the Evers case,” Jasmine continued. “And produced more than simple justice for Myrlie Evers and her children. It sent a tremendous signal that Mississippi had changed, and if we got a conviction here, it might happen everywhere. Light bulbs went off all over the South, and pretty soon we had convictions in the Birmingham church bombings and in a whole lot of other Klan killings. All the way up to Indianapolis and Pennsylvania.”

“A compelling case, counselor,” I said.

“Feed one person’s hunger for justice and you can feed a whole people. It’s a fish and loaves kind of thing.”